This is the first of a sequence of lectures discussing various levels
of linguistic analysis.

We'll start with morphology, which deals with morphemes (the
minimal units of linguistic form and meaning), and how they make up words.

We'll then discuss phonology, which deals with phonemes (the
meaningless elements that "spell out" the sound of morphemes), and phonetics,
which studies the way language is embodied in the activity of speaking,
the resulting physical sounds, and the process of speech perception..

Then we'll look at syntax, which deals with the way that words
are combined into phrases and sentences. Finally, we'll take up two aspects
of meaning, namely semantics, which deals with how sentences are
connected with things in the world outside of language, and pragmatics,
which deals with how people use all the levels of language to communicate.

The peculiar nature of morphology

From a logical point of view, morphology is the oddest of the
levels of linguistic analysis. Whenever I give this lecture to an introductory class, I'm always reminded of what the particle physicist Isidor Rabi said when he learned about the discovery of the muon: "Who ordered that?" By serendipity, this morning's New York TImes has a review of a new book, "The Hunting of the Quark", that tells the story:

In the fifth century B.C., that prescient Greek philosopher started humanity on its search for the universe's ultimate building blocks when he suggested that all matter was made of infinitesimally small particles called atoms. In 1897, the British physicist J. J. Thomson complicated the issue when he discovered the first subatomic particle, the electron. Later, others recognized the proton and neutron. As atom smashers grew in the next few decades, myriads of ephemeral particles appeared in the debris, a veritable Greek alphabet soup of lambdas, sigmas and pions. ''Who ordered that?'' exclaimed the theorist Isidor I. Rabi when the muon was identified.

Given the basic design of human spoken
language, the levels of phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics are
arguably unavoidable. They needn't look exactly the way that they do,
perhaps, but there has to be something to do the work of each of these
levels.

But morphology is basically gratuitous, as well as complex and irregular: anything that a language does
with morphology, it usually can also do more straightforwardly with syntax; and there is always
some other language that does the same thing with syntax.

For instance, English morphology inflects nouns to specify plurality:
thus dogs means "more than one dog". This inflection
lets us be specific, in a compact way, about the distinction between one
and more-than-one. Of course, we could always say the same thing in a
more elaborated way, using the resources of syntax rather than morphology:
more than one dog. If we want to be vague, we have to be long winded:
one or more dogs.

Modern Standard Chinese (also known as "Mandarin" or "Putonghua")
makes exactly the opposite choice: there is no morphological marking for
plurality, so we can be succinctly vague about whether we mean one or
more of something, while we need to be more long-winded if we want to
be specific. Thus (in Pinyin orthography with tone numbers after each
syllable):

1.

na4er5

you3

gou3

there

have

dog

"there's a dog or dogs there."

2.

na4er5

you3

ji3

zhi1

gou3

there

have

several

CLASSIFIER

dog

"there's dogs there"

As an example of another kind of morphological packaging, English can
make iconify from icon and -ify, meaning "make
into an icon." Perhaps it's nice to have a single word for it, but
we could always have said "make into an icon." And many languages
lack any general way to turn a noun X into a verb meaning "to make
into (an) X", and so must use the longer-winded mode of expression.
Indeed, the process in English is rather erratic: we say vaporize
not *vaporify, and emulsify not *emulsionify, and
so on.

In fact, one of the ways that morphology typically differs from syntax
is its combinatoric irregularity. Words are mostly combined logically
and systematically. So when you exchange money for something you can be
said to "buy" it or to "purchase" it -- we'd be surprised
if (say) groceries, telephones and timepieces could only be "purchased,"
while clothing, automobiles and pencils could only be "bought,"
and things denoted by words of one syllable could only be "acquired
in exchange for money."

Yet irrational combinatoric nonsense of this type happens all the time
in morphology. Consider the adjectival forms of the names of countries
or regions in English. There are at least a half a dozen different endings,
and also many variations in how much of the name of the country is retained
before the ending is added:

And you can't mix 'n match stems and endings here: *Taiwanian,
*Egyptese, and so on just don't work.

To make it worse, the word for citizen of Xand the general
adjectival form meaning associated with locality X are usually
but not always the same. Exceptions include Pole/Polish, Swede/Swedish,
Scot/Scottish, Greenlandic/Greenlander. And there are some
oddities about pluralization: we talk about "the French" and
"the Chinese" but "the Greeks" and "the Canadians".
The plural forms "the Frenches" and "the Chineses"
are not even possible, and the singular forms "the Greek" and
"the Canadian" mean something entirely different.

What a mess!

It's worse in some ways than having to memorize a completely different
word in every case (like "The Netherlands" and "Dutch"),
because there are just enough partial regularities to be confusing.

This brings up George W. Bush. For years, there has been a web
feature at Slate magazine devoted
to "Bushisms", many if not most of them arising from his individual
approach to English morphology. Some of the early and famous examples,
from the 1999 presidential campaign, focus on the particular case under
discussion here:

"If the East Timorians decide to revolt, I'm
sure I'll have a statement." —Quoted by Maureen Dowd in the New YorkTimes,
June 16, 1999

"Keep good relations with the Grecians."—Quoted
in the Economist, June 12, 1999

"Kosovians can move back in."—CNN Inside Politics,
April 9, 1999

President Bush, if these quotes are accurate, quite sensibly decided
that -ian should be the default ending, after deletion of a final
vowel if present. This follows the common model of Brazil::Brazilians
and Canada::Canadians, and gives Bush's
East Timor::East Timorians, Greece::Grecians
and Kosovo::Kosovians, instead of
the correct (but unpredictable) forms East Timorese,
Greeks and Kosovars.
And why not? The President's method is more logical than the way the English
language handles it.

Despite these derivational anfractuosities, English morphology is simple
and regular compared to the morphological systems of many other languages.
One question we need to ask ourselves is: why do languages inflict morphology
on their users -- and their politicians?

What is a word?

We've started talking blithely about words and morphemes as if it were
obvious that these categories exist and that we know them when we see
them. This assumption comes naturally to literate speakers of English,
because we've learned through reading and writing where white space goes,
which defines word boundaries for us; and we soon see many cases where
English words have internal parts with separate meanings or grammatical
functions, which must be morphemes.

In some languages, the application of these terms is even clearer. In
languages like Latin, for example, words can usually be "scrambled"
into nearly any order in a phrase. As Allen and Greenough's New Latin
Grammar says, "In connected discourse the word most prominent in
the speaker's mind comes first, and so on in order of prominence."

Thus the simple two-word sentence facis amice"you act kindly"also occurs asamice
facis with essentially the same meaning, but some difference
in emphasis. However, the morphemes that make up each of these two words
must occur in a fixed order and without anything inserted between them.
The word amice combines the stem /amic-/
"loving, friendly, kind" and the adverbial ending /-e/; we can't
change the order of these, or put another word in between them. Likewise
the verb stem /fac-/ "do, make, act" and the inflectional ending
/-is/ (second person singular present tense active) are fixed in their
relationship in the word facis, and
can't be reordered or separated.

Among many others, the modern Slavic languages such as Czech and Russian
show a similar contrast between words freely circulating within phrases,
and morphemes rigidly arranged within words. In such languages, the basic
concepts of word and morpheme are natural and inevitable
analytic categories.

In a language like English, where word order is much less free, we can
still find evidence of a similar kind for the distinction between morphemes
and words. For example, between two words we can usually insert some other
words (without changing the basic meaning and relationship of the originals),
while between two morphemes we usually can't.

Thus in the phrase "she has arrived", we treat she
and has as separate words, while the
/-ed/ ending of arrived is treated
as part of a larger word. In accordance with this, we can introduce other
material into the white space between the words: "she apparently
has already arrived." But there is no way to put anything at all
in between /arrive/ and /-ed/. And there are other forms of the sentence
in which the word order is different -- "has she arrived?";
"arrived, has she?" -- but no form in which the morphemes in
arrived are re-ordered.

Tests of this kind don't entirely agree with the conventions of English
writing. For example, we can't really stick other words in the middle
of compound words like swim team and
picture frame, at least not while
maintaining the meanings and relationships of the words we started with.
In this sense they are not very different from the morphemes in complex
words like re+calibrate or consumer+ism,
which we write "solid", i.e. without spaces. A recent (and controversial)
official spelling reform of German make changes in both directions splitting
some compounds orthographically while merging others: old radfahren became new Rad fahren,
but old Samstag morgen became new
Samstagmorgen..

As this change emphasizes, the question of whether a morpheme sequence
is written "solid" is largely a matter of orthographic convention,
and in any case may be variable even in a particular writing system. English
speakers feel that many noun-noun compounds are words, even though they
clearly contain other words, and may often be written with a space or
a hyphen between them: "sparkplug", "shot glass".
These are common combinations with a meaning that is not entirely predictable
from the meanings of their parts, and therefore they can be found as entries
in most English dictionaries. But where should we draw the line? are all
noun compounds to be considered words, including those where compounds
are compounded? What about (say) government tobacco
price support program? In ordinary usage, we'd be more inclined
to call this a phrase, though it is technically correct to call it a "compound
noun" and thus in some sense a single -- though complex -- word.
Of course, in German, the corresponding compound would probably be written
solid, making its "wordhood" plainer.

There are a number of interesting theories out there about why morphology exists, and why it has the properties that it does. If these theories turn out to be correct, then maybe linguistics will be as lucky with the complexities of morphology as physics was with "Greek alphabet soup" of elementary particles discovered in the fifties and sixties, which turned out to be complex composites of quarks and leptons, composed according to the elegant laws of quantum chromodynamics.

Universality of the concepts "word" and "morpheme"

Do the concepts of word and morpheme then apply in all
languages? The answer is "(probably) yes". Certainly the concept
of morpheme -- the minimal unit of form and meaning -- arises naturally
in the analysis of every language.

The concept of word is trickier. There are at least two troublesome
issues: making the distinction between words and phrases, and the status
of certain grammatical formatives known as clitics.

Words vs. phrases

Since words can be made up of several morphemes, and may include several
other words, it is easy to find cases where a particular sequence of elements
might arguably be considered either a word or a phrase. We've already
looked at the case of compounds in English.

In some languages, this boundary is even harder to draw. In the case
of Chinese, the eminent linguist Y.R. Chao (1968: 136) says, 'Not every
language has a kind of unit which behaves in most (not to speak all) respects
as does the unit called "word" . . . It is therefore a matter of fiat
and not a question of fact whether to apply the word "word" to a type
of subunit in the Chinese sentence.' On the other hand, other linguists
have argued that the distinction between words and phrases is both definable
and useful in Chinese grammar. The Chinese writing system has no tradition
of using spaces or other delimiters to mark word boundaries; and in fact
the whole issue of how (and whether) to define "words" in Chinese
does not seem to have arisen until 1907, although the Chinese grammatical
tradition goes back a couple of millennia.

Status of clitics

In most languages, there is a set of elements whose status as separate
words seems ambiguous. Examples in English include the 'd
(reduced form of "would"), the infinitival to,
and the article a, in I'd
like to buy a dog. These forms certainly can't "stand
alone as a complete utterance", as some definitions of wordwould have it. The sound pattern of these "little words"
is also usually extremely reduced, in a way that makes them act like part
of the words adjacent to them. There isn't any difference in pronunciation
between the noun phrase a tack and
the verb attack. However, these forms
are like separate words in some other ways, especially in terms of how
they combine with other words.

Members of this class of "little words" are known as clitics.
Their peculiar properties can be explained by assuming that they are independent
elements at the syntactic level of analysis, but not at the phonological
level. In other words, they both are and are not words. Some languages
write clitics as separate words, while others write them together with
their adjacent "host" words. English writes most clitics separate,
but uses the special "apostrophe" separator for some clitics,
such as the reduced forms of is, have
and would ('s
've 'd), and possessive 's.

The possessive 's in English is an
instructive example, because we can contrast its behavior with that of
the plural s. These two morphemes
are pronounced in exactly the same variable way, dependent on the sounds
that precede them:

Noun

Noun + s (plural)

Noun + s (possessive)

Pronunciation
(both)

thrush

thrushes

thrush's

iz

toy

toys

toy's

z

block

blocks

block's

s

And neither the plural nor the possessive can be used by itself. So from
this point of view, the possessive acts like a part of the noun, just
as the plural does. However, the plural and possessive behave very differently
in some other ways:

If we add a following modifier to a noun, the possessive follows the modifier,
but the plural sticks with the head noun:

Morpheme stays with head noun

Morpheme follows modifier

Plural

The toys I bought yesterday were on sale.

*The toy I bought yesterdays were on sale.

Possessive

*The toy's I bought yesterday price was special.

The toy I bought yesterday's price was special.

In other words, the plural continues like part of the noun, but the possessive
acts like a separate word, which follows the whole phrase containing the noun
(even though it is merged in terms of sound with the last word of that noun
phrase).

There are lots of nouns with irregular plurals, but none with irregular
possessives:

Plural (irregular in these cases)

Possessive (always regular)

oxen

ox's

spectra

spectrum's

mice

mouse's

Actually, English does have few irregular possessives: his,her, my,
your, their. But these exceptions prove the rule:
these pronominal possessives act like inflections, so that the possessor
is always the referent of the pronoun itself, not of some larger phrase
that it happens to be at the end of.

So the possessive 's in English is
like a word in some ways, and like an inflectional morpheme in some others.
This kind of mixed status is commonly found with words that express grammatical
functions. It is one of the ways that morphology develops historically.
As a historical matter, a clitic is likely to start out as a fully separate
word, and then "weaken" so as to merge phonologically with its
hosts. In many cases, inflectional affixes may have been clitics at an
earlier historical stage, and then lost their syntactic independence.

[A book that used to be the course text for LING001
lists the English possessive 's as an inflectional affix, and last year's
version of these lecture notes followed the text in this regard. This
is an easy mistake to make: in most languages with possessive morphemes,
they behave like inflections, and it's natural to think of 's as analogous
to (say) the Latin genitive case. Nevertheless, it's clear that English
possessive 's is a clitic and not an inflectional affix.]

Words nevertheless useful

Important distinctions are often difficult to define for cases near the
boundary. This is among the reasons that we have lawyers and courts. The
relative difficulty of making a distinction is not a strong argument,
one way or the other, for the value of that distinction: it's not always
easy, for example, to distinguish homicide from other (and less
serious) kinds of involvement in someone's death. Despite the difficulties
of distinguishing word from phrase on one side and from
morpheme on the other, most linguists find the concept of word
useful and even essential in analyzing most languages.

In the end, we wind up with two definitions of word: the ordinary
usage, where that exists (as it does for English or Spanish, and does
not for Chinese); and a technical definition, emerging from a particular
theory about language structure as applied to a specific language.

Relationship between words and morphemes

What is the relationship between words and morphemes? It's a hierarchical
one: a word is made up of one or more morphemes. Most commonly, these
morphemes are strung together, or concatenated, in a line. However, it
is not uncommon to find non-concatenative morphemes. Thus
the Arabic root /ktb/ "write" has (among many other forms)

katab

pefective active

kutib

perfective passive

aktub

imperfective active

uktab

imperfective passive

The three consonants of the root are not simply concatenated with other
morphemes meaning things like "imperfective" or "passive",
but rather are shuffled among the vowels and syllable positions that define
the various forms. Still, a given word is still made up of a set of morphemes,
it's just that the set is not combined by simple concatenation in all
cases.

Simpler examples of non-concatenative morphology include infixes,
like the insertion of emphatic words in English cases
like "un-frigging-believable", or Tagalog

bili

'buy'

binili

'bought'

basa

'read'

binasa

'read' (past)

sulat

'write'

sinulat

'wrote'

Categories and subcategories of words and morphemes

The different types of words are variously called parts of speech,
word classes, or lexical categories. The Cambridge Encyclopedia
of Language gives this list of 8 for English:

This set might be further subdivided: here is a list
of 36 part-of-speech tags used in the Penn
TreeBank project. Most of the increase (from 8 to 36) is by subdivision
(e.g. "noun" divided into "singular common noun,"
"plural common noun," "singular proper noun," "plural
proper noun," etc., but there are a few extra odds and ends, such
as "cardinal number."

Other descriptions of English have used slightly different ways of dividing
the pie, but it is generally easy to see how one scheme translates into
another. Looking across languages, we can see somewhat greater differences.
For instance, some languages don't really distinguish between verbs and
adjectives. In such languages, we can think of adjectives as a kind of
verb: "the grass greens," rather than "the grass is green."
Other differences reflect different structural choices. For instance,
English words like in, on,
under, with
are called prepositions, and this name makes sense given that they
precede the noun phrase they introduce: with
a stick. In many languages, the words that correspond to English
prepositions follow their noun phrase rather than preceding it, and are
thus more properly called postpositions, as in the following Hindi
example:

Types of morphemes:

Bound Morphemes: cannot occur on their own, e.g. de- in detoxify,
-tion in creation, -s in dogs, cran- in cranberry.

Free Morphemes: can occur as separate words, e.g. car, yes.

In a morphologically complex word -- a word composed of more than one morpheme
-- one constituent may be considered as the basic one, the core of the form,
with the others treated as being added on. The basic or core morpheme in such
cases is referred to as the stem, root, or base, while the add-ons
are affixes. Affixes that precede the stem are of course prefixes,
while those that follow the stem are suffixes. Thus in rearranged,
re- is a prefix, arrange is a stem, and -d is a suffix.
Morphemes can also be infixes, which are inserted within another form.
English doesn't really have any infixes, except perhaps for certain expletives
in expressions like un-effing-believable or Kalama-effing-zoo.

Prefixes and suffixes are almost always bound, but what about the stems?
Are they always free? In English, some stems that occur with negative
prefixes are not free, such as -kemptand -sheveled. Bad jokes about some
of these missing bound morphemes have become so frequent that they may
re-enter common usage.

Morphemes can also be divided into the two categories of content and
function morphemes, a distinction that is conceptually distinct from
the free-bound distinction but that partially overlaps with it in practice.

The idea behind thisdistinction is that some morphemes express
some general sort of referential or informational content, in a
way that is as independent as possible of the grammatical system of a
particular language -- while other morphemes are heavily tied to a grammatical
function, expressing syntactic relationships between units in a
sentence, or obligatorily-marked categories such as number or tense.

Thus (the stems of) nouns, verbs, adjectives are typically content
morphemes: "throw," "green," "Kim," and
"sand" are all English content morphemes. Content morphemes
are also often called open-class morphemes, because they belong
to categories that are open to the invention of arbitrary new items. People
are always making up or borrowing new morphemes in these categories.:
"smurf," "nuke," "byte," "grok."

By contrast, prepositions ("to", "by"), articles
("the", "a"), pronouns ("she", "his"),
and conjunctions are typically function morphemes, since they either
serve to tie elements together grammatically ("hit by a truck,"
"Kim and Leslie," "Lee saw his dog"),
or express obligatory (in a given language!) morphological features
like definiteness ("she found a table" or "she found the
table" but not "*she found table"). Function morphemes
are also called "closed-class" morphemes, because they
belong to categories that are essentially closed to invention or borrowing
-- it is very difficult to add a new preposition, article
or pronoun.

For years, some people have tried to introduce non-gendered pronouns into English,
for instance "sie" (meaning either "he" or "she",
but not "it"). This is much harder to do than to get people to adopt
a new noun or verb.

Try making up a new article. For instance, we could try to borrow from
the Manding languages an article (written "le") that means something
like "I'm focusing on this phrase as opposed to anything else I could
have mentioned." We'll just slip in this new article after the definite
or indefinite "the" or "a" -- that's where it goes
in Manding, though the rest of the order is completely different. Thus
we would say "Kim bought an apple at the-le fruit stand," meaning
"it's the fruit stand (as opposed to anyplace else) where Kim bought
an apple;" or "Kim bought an-le apple at the fruit stand,"
meaning "it's an apple (as opposed to any other kind of fruit) that
Kim bought at the fruit stand."

This is a perfectly sensible kind of morpheme to have. Millions of West
Africans use it every day. However, the chances of persuading the rest
of the English-speaking community to adopt it are negligible.

In some ways the open/closed terminology is clearer than content/function,
since obviously function morphemes also always have some content!

The concept of the morpheme does not directly map onto the units of sound that
represent morphemes in speech. To do this, linguists developed the concept of
the allomorph. Here is the definition given in a well-known linguistic
workbook:

Allomorphs: Nondistinctive
realizations of a particular morpheme that have the same function and are
phonetically similar. For example, the English plural morpheme can appear
as [s] as in cats, [z] as in dogs, or ['z] as in churches.
Each of these three pronunciations is said to be an allomorph of the same
morpheme.

Inflectional vs. Derivational Morphology

Another common distinction is the one between derivational and
inflectional affixes.

Derivational morphemes makes new words from old ones. Thus creation
is formed from create by adding a morpheme that makes nouns out
of (some) verbs.

Derivational morphemes generally

change the part of speech or the basic meaning of a word. Thus -ment
added to a verb forms a noun (judg-ment). re-activate means
"activate again."

are not required by syntactic relations outside the word. Thus un-kind
combines un- and kind into a single new word, but has no
particular syntactic connections outside the word -- we can say he is unkind
or he is kind or they are unkind or they are kind, depending
on what we mean.

are often not productive or regular in form or meaning -- derivational
morphemes can be selective about what they'll combine with, and may
also have erratic effects on meaning. Thus the suffix -hood occurs
with just a few nouns such as brother, neighbor, and knight,
but not with most others. e.g., *friendhood, *daughterhood, or
*candlehood. Furthermore "brotherhood" can mean "the
state or relationship of being brothers," but "neighborhood"
cannot mean "the state or relationship of being neighbors."
Note however that some derivational affixes are quite regular in form
and meaning, e.g. -ism.

in English, may appear either as prefixes or suffixes: pre-arrange,
arrange-ment.

Inflectional morphemes vary (or "inflect") the form of words in
order to express the grammatical features that a given language chooses,
such as singular/plural or past/present tense.Thus Boy and
boys, for example, are two different forms of the "same" word.
In English, we must choose the singular form or the plural form; if we
choose the basic form with no affix, we have chosen the singular.

Inflectional Morphemes generally:

do not change basic syntactic category: thus big, bigg-er, bigg-est
are all adjectives.

express grammatically-required features or indicate relations between
different words in the sentence. Thus in Lee love-s Kim, -s marks
the 3rd person singular present form of the verb, and also relates it
to the 3rd singular subject Lee.

occur outside any derivational morphemes. Thus in ration-al-iz-ation-s
the final -s is inflectional, and appears at the very end of
the word, outside the derivational morphemes -al, -iz,-ation.

In English, are suffixes only.

Some examples of English derivational and inflectional morphemes:

derivational

inflectional

-ation

-s Plural

-ize

-ed Past

-ic

-ing Progressive

-y

-er Comparative

-ous

-est Superlative

Properties of some derivational affixes in English:

-ation

is added to a verb

to give a noun

finalize
confirm

finalization
confirmation

un-

is added to a verb

to give a verb

tie
wind

untie
unwind

un-

is added to an adjective

to give an adjective

happy
wise

unhappy
unwise

-al

is added to a noun

to give an adjective

institution
universe

institutional
universal

-ize

is added to an adjective

to give a verb

concrete
solar

concretize
solarize

Keep in mind that most morphemes are neither derivational nor inflectional!
For instance, the English morphemes Melissa,
twist, tele-,
and ouch.

Also, most linguists feel that the inflectional/derivational distinction
is not a fundamental or foundational question at all, but just a sometimes-useful
piece of terminology whose definitions involve a somewhat complex combination
of more basic properties. Therefore we will not be surprised to find cases
for which the application of the distinction is unclear.

For example, the English suffix -ing
has several uses that are arguably on the borderline between inflection
and derivation (along with other uses that are not).

One very regular use of -ing is to indicate progressive aspect
in verbs, following forms of "to be": She is going; he will
be leaving; they had been asking. This use is generally considered
an inflectional suffix, part of the system for marking tense and aspect
in English verbs.

Another, closely related use is to make present participles of
verbs, which are used like adjectives: Falling water; stinking
mess; glowing embers. According to the rule that inflection
doesn't change the lexical category, this should be a form of morphological
derivation, since it changes verbs to adjectives. But in fact it is probably
the same process, at least historically as is involved in marking progressive
aspect on verbs, since "being in the process of doing X" is
one of the natural meanings of the adjectival form X-ing.

There is another, regular use of -ing
to make verbal nouns: Flying can be dangerous; losing is painful.
The -ing forms in these cases are
often called gerunds. By the "changes lexical categories" rule,
this should also be a derivational affix, since it turns a verb into a
noun. However, many people feel that such cases are determined by grammatical
context, so that a phrase like Kim peeking around the corner surprised
me actually is related to, or derived from, a tenseless form of the
sentence Kim peeked around the corner. On this view, the affix
-ing is a kind of inflection, since it creates a form of the verb appropriate
for a particular grammatical situation, rather than making a new, independent
word. Thus the decision about whether -ing
is an inflection in this case depends on your analysis of the syntactic
relationships involved.

It's for reasons like this that the distinction between inflectional
and derivational affixes is just a sometimes-convenient descriptive one,
and not a basic distinction in theory.

What is the meaning of an affix?

The meanings of derivational affixes are sometimes clear, but often are obscured
by changes that occur over time. The following two sets of examples show that
the prefix un- is easily interpreted as "not" when applied to
adjectives, and as a reversing action when applied to verbs, but the prefix con-
is more opaque.

un-

untie

unshackle

unharness

unhappy

untimely

unthinkable

unmentionable

con-

constitution

confess

connect

contract

contend

conspire

complete

Are derivational affixes sensitive to the historical source
of the roots they attach to?

Although English is a Germanic language, and most of its basic vocabulary derives
from Old English, there is also a sizeable vocabulary that derives from Romance
(Latin and French). Some English affixes, such as re-, attach freely to
vocabulary from both sources. Other affixes, such as "-ation", are more
limited.

ROOT

tie

consider

free form

free form

Germanic root

Latinate root

SOURCE

Old English tygan, "to tie"

Latin considerare, "to examine"

PREFIX

retie

reconsider

SUFFIX

reties

reconsiders

retying

reconsideration

retyings

reconsiderations

The suffix -ize, which some prescriptivists object to in words like
hospitalize, has a long and venerable
history.

According to Hans Marchand, in The Categories and Types of Present-Day English
Word Formation (University of Alabama Press, 1969), the
suffix -ize comes originally from the Greek -izo. Many words
ending with this suffix passed from Ecclesiastical Greek into Latin, where,
by the fourth century, they had become established as verbs with the ending
-izare, such as barbarizare, catechizare, christianizare. In Old
French we find many such verbs, belonging primarily to the ecclesistical sphere:
baptiser (11th c.), canoniser (13th c.), exorciser (14th
c.).

The first -ize words to be found in English are loans with both a French
and Latin pattern such as baptize (1297), catechize, and organize
(both 15th c.) Towards the end of the 16th century, however, we come across
many new formations in English, such as bastardize, equalize, popularize,
and womanize. The formal and semantic patterns were the same as those
from the borrowed French and Latin forms, but owing to the renewed study of
Greek, the educated had become more familiar with its vocabulary and used the
patterns of Old Greek word formation freely.

Between 1580 and 1700, the disciplines of literature, medicine, natural science
and theology introduced a great deal of new terminology into the language. Some
of the terms still in use today include criticize, fertilize, humanize, naturalize,
satirize, sterilize, and symbolize. The growth of science contributed
vast numbers of -ize formations through the 19th century and into the
20th.

The -ize words collected by students in
in this class nine years ago show that -ize is almost entirely restricted
to Romance vocabulary, the only exceptions we found being womanize
and winterize. Even though most contemporary English speakers are
not consciously aware of which words in their vocabulary are from which
source, they have respected this distinction in coining new words.

Constituent Structure of Words

The constituent morphemes of a word can be organized into a branching
or hierarchical structure, sometimes called a tree structure. Consider
the word unusable. It contains three
morphemes:

prefix "un-"

verb stem "use"

suffix "-able"

What is the structure? Is it first "use" + "-able" to make
"usable", then combined with "un-" to make "unusable"?
or is it first "un-" + "use" to make "unuse",
then combined with "-able" to make "unusable"? Since "unuse"
doesn't exist in English, while "usable" does, we prefer the first
structure, which corresponds to the tree shown below.

This analysis is supported by the general behavior of these affixes. There
is a prefix "un-" that attaches to adjectives to make adjectives with
a negative meaning ("unhurt", "untrue", "unhandy",
etc.). And there is a suffix "-able" that attaches to verbs and forms
adjectives ("believable", "fixable", "readable").
This gives us the analysis pictured above. There is no way to combine a prefix
"un-" directly with the verb "use", so the other logically-possible
structure won't work.

Now let's consider the word "unlockable". This also consists
of three morphemes:

prefix "un-"

verb stem "lock"

suffix "-able"

This time, though, a little thought shows us that there are two different meanings
for this word: one corresponding to the left-hand figure, meaning "not lockable,"
and a second one corresponding to the right-hand figure, meaning "able to be
unlocked."

In fact, un- can indeed attach to (some) verbs: untie, unbutton,
uncover, uncage, unwrap... Larry Horn (1988) points out
that the verbs that permit prefixation with un- are those that effect
a change in state in some object, the form with un- denoting the undoing
(!)of that change.

This lets us account for the two senses of "unlockable"..
We can combine the suffix -able with the verb lock to form an
adjective lockable, and then combine the prefix un- with lockable
to make a new adjective unlockable, meaning "not able to be locked".
Or we can combine the prefix un- with the verb lock to form a
new verb unlock, and the combine the suffix -able with unlock
to form an adjective unlockable, meaning "able to be unlocked".

By making explicit the different possible hierarchies for a single word,
we can better understand why its meaning might be ambiguous.

Morphology FAQ

These questions and answers are based on some patterns of error observed
in homeworks and exams in previous years.

Can a word = a morpheme?

Yes, at least in the sense that a word may contain exactly one morpheme:

Word (=Morpheme)

Word Class

car

noun

thank

verb

true

adjective

succotash

noun

gosh

interjection

under

preposition

she

pronoun

so

conjunction

often

adverb

Are there morphemes that are not words?

Yes, none of the following morphemes is a word:

Morpheme

Category

un-

prefix

dis-

prefix

-ness

suffix

-s

suffix

kempt
(as in unkempt)

bound morpheme

Can a word = a syllable?

Yes, at least in the sense that a word may consist of exactly one syllable:

Word

Word Class

car

noun

work

verb

in

preposition

whoops

interjection

Are there morphemes that are not syllables?

Yes, some of the following morphemes consist of more than one syllable;
some of them are less than a syllable:

Morpheme

Word Class

under

preposition (> syll.)

spider

noun (> syll.)

-s

'plural' (< syll.)

Are there syllables that are not morphemes?

Yes, many syllables are "less" than morphemes. Just because you
can break a word into two or more syllables does not mean it must consist
of more than one morpheme!

Word

Syllables

Comments

kayak

(ka.yak)

neither ka nor yak is a morpheme

broccoli

(bro.ko.li) or (brok.li)

neither bro nor brok nor ko nor li
is a morpheme

angle

(ang.gle)

neither ang nor gle is a morpheme

jungle

(jung.gle)

neither jung nor gle is a morpheme

So (if you were wondering -- and yes, some people have trouble with this)
there is no necessary relationship between syllables, morphemes,
and words. Each is an independent unit of structure.

What are the major differences between derivational and
inflectional affixes?

First, it's worth saying that most linguists today consider this distinction
as a piece of convenient descriptive terminology, without any fundamental
theoretical status. Then we can point to the basic meanings of the terms:
derivational affixes "derive" new words from old ones, while
inflectional affixes "inflect" words for certain grammatical
or semantic properties.

derivational

inflectional

position

closer to stem

further from stem

addable on to?

yes

not in English

meaning?

(often) unpredictable

predictable

changes word class?

maybe

no

Are clitics inflectional or derivational morphemes?

The answer would depend on your definitions -- and as
we explained earlier, the categories of "inflection" and "derivation"
are descriptive terms that really don't have a strong theoretical basis.
However, based on comparison to typical examples of inflectional and
derivational affixes, the answer seems to be "neither", in
that clitics are not really lexical affixes at all.